Leonid Lukyanov

I'm Leonid Lukyanov, CEO and co-founder of Aklivity, based in Palo Alto. My career has spanned across finance and tech. I've been a VC, operator, developer and founder. I studied math, theoretical economics, and computer science at NYU, then attended Stern for my MBA before dropping out to start Aklivity.

My first venture was Lytit, where I founded and built a real-time social media search engine. After that, I moved to the investment side at Blue Cloud Ventures, where I focused on infrastructure and data companies. I then led product at Kaazing (later renamed Tenefit), where I was part of the team that pioneered WebSocket technology and brought it to the enterprise market.

I co-founded Aklivity in 2021 with John Fallows to solve a straightforward problem: connecting applications to event-driven streaming infrastructure was unnecessarily complex. We built Zilla, an open-source, multi-protocol API gateway that lets non-Kafka apps publish and subscribe to Kafka topics natively — no intermediary brokers, no extra services. We raised institutional VC funding and have been building since. I've partnered with companies like KONE and worked with AWS on secure MSK connectivity solutions. The API gateway is becoming a foundational layer in event-driven architectures, and that's exactly what we're building for.